Inter-city pizza dispute escalates to city council resolution; deep dish designated ‘casserole’ formally
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
The Incident
NEW YORK — A Chicago resident visiting Manhattan for a work conference made a casual remark comparing the New York pizza slice unfavorably to Chicago’s deep dish style, describing it as thin and floppy, on Thursday, triggering a response that one observer described as disproportionate and that several other observers described as entirely appropriate given the stakes.
The remark was made at a pizzeria near Columbus Circle and was heard by four New Yorkers, who responded with the unified force of people defending something they consider fundamental to their identity and that, to be fair to them, genuinely is. New York pizza is not merely a food preference. It is a philosophical position, a relationship to dough and sauce and cheese that encodes specific values — the foldable slice, the coal-fired crust, the correct ratio of cheese to sauce, the proper way to eat a slice which involves folding it and eating while standing or walking and not requiring a knife and fork — and to challenge it is to challenge something that New Yorkers regard as objectively correct in the way that they regard few other things.
The Deep Dish Question
Chicago’s deep dish pizza is, objectively, delicious. This is not in dispute and would not be denied by the most committed New York pizza partisans, who describe it as a fine product in a category adjacent to pizza. The dispute is taxonomic: whether deep dish, which involves a thick crust, large amounts of cheese layered beneath the sauce, and a preparation that takes thirty minutes and requires a utensil, is the same kind of thing as a New York slice, which takes three minutes and requires only a hand. Both objects are called pizza. New Yorkers argue that the similarity ends there, approximately, and that calling deep dish pizza is a category error in the direction of generosity.
The city council of New York City has not, to date, passed a resolution formally designating Chicago deep dish as a casserole. Reports that such a resolution was being drafted appear to be satirical in origin. The actual city council has matters of more immediate concern, including housing, transit, and the rat situation. Gothamist has never formally weighed in on the taxonomic question because it is a New York publication and its position is implied by its zip code. New York Post has weighed in, repeatedly, because it is the New York Post.
The Visiting Chicago Resident
The Chicago resident, when reached for follow-up comment, said that he had enjoyed his New York pizza and had not intended to start an incident, that he still preferred deep dish, that he understood this preference was not welcome in the current environment, and that he was flying home on Sunday and was looking forward to it. He was a reasonable person who had wandered into a cultural fault line without adequate preparation. This happens. The fault line remains. Future visitors are advised to approach the pizza topic with the diplomatic caution appropriate to a subject that New Yorkers consider settled and that the rest of the world keeps reopening, apparently unaware that it has been settled. New York pizza is correct. This is the position. Other positions exist. They are noted and not adopted.
New York, New York
New York City operates at a scale and intensity that makes every story a larger story. The subway delay is a story about infrastructure investment and political will. The rent increase is a story about housing policy and urban economics. The bagel dispute is a story about cultural identity and immigration history. The rat is a story about urbanization and ecological adaptation. The tourist is a story about how cities present themselves to the world and how the world receives what cities offer. Even the pizza disagreement is, underneath the comedy, a story about regional identity and the human need to have things that are ours, specifically ours, that we defend with disproportionate vigor precisely because they are ours and because the world is large and we need to stake our territory somewhere. New York is where many of these stories happen simultaneously, in a density that produces the particular creative friction that has made the city a cultural generator for a century and a half. The people who live here tolerate the cost and the noise and the subway delays and the rent and the rats because the city gives back something that cannot be fully quantified: the experience of being in a place where things are happening, where ideas collide, where the next conversation might change how you think about something, where the scale of human activity is so concentrated that you are reminded constantly that you are part of something enormous and ongoing. This is the deal. Most people who make it find it sufficient. Some find it extraordinary. None of them are moving to the suburbs.
New York remains, above all, a city of stories — stories told by its residents about themselves, about each other, about the city they chose and the city that chose them back. Every borough has its version. Every neighborhood has its variation. Every block has someone who remembers when it was different and someone who cannot imagine it any other way, and between these two perspectives the city lives, in the space between what it was and what it is becoming, which is the only space any living city can occupy.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com